Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
ON THE SEX OF SOUL AND FLESH ARISING TOGETHER. [1] It is to these questions, I think, that we must now return, from which we digressed. We had established that the soul is sown in man, and out of man, by man himself, and that there is one seed from the beginning — of soul as much as of flesh — for the whole muster of the race; this against the rival opinions of philosophers and heretics, and that stale old speech of Plato's. Now let us weave the order of the discussions that follow from it. [2] The soul, sown in the womb together with the flesh, receives its sex together with the flesh, and in such a way that neither substance can be credited alone with the cause of sex. For if the conception of the two substances allowed any gap between them, so that either flesh or soul were sown first, then it would follow that the property of sex belonged to one substance alone, through a temporal gap in the seeds — so that either flesh stamped sex on the soul, or soul on the flesh — [3] just as Apelles (not the painter, the heretic), positing souls male and female before bodies, as he learned from Philumena, necessarily makes the flesh, as the later thing, receive its sex from the soul. And those who bring the soul in after birth to a flesh already formed, necessarily let the flesh — made male or female beforehand — prejudge the sex for the soul. [4] But the seeds of both substances are undivided, and their commingled outpouring undergoes one common event of generation, tracing whatever lines the reason of nature has drawn. Certainly the very form of our first origin bears witness to this: the male is fashioned earlier (Adam is first), the woman somewhat later (Eve is second). Thus the flesh remains for a long while unformed, just as it was plucked from Adam's side — yet it is already a living thing even then, since I recognize that portion of Adam, too, as soul already. And indeed God's breath would have ensouled that portion as well, had there not been, in the woman, a soul-transmission from Adam just as there was a flesh-transmission.